Police apathy allowed Fazul to attack Paradise Hotel

On a cloudless Thursday morning 13 years ago today, a brown Dyna truck left house number 43 in Runda estate, and within an hour after setting off, introduced the world to the new age of global terrorism.

The bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were the first mega-attacks by Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network.

One of the key masterminds behind the attacks was Fazul Abdullah Mohamed, a name that has become familiar to East Africans over the past decade.

Today, the world marks the first anniversary in which both of the key figures responsible for that atrocity are dead. That should bring a feeling of closure, especially to the victims.

Ms Lucy Anyango Aringo, who was seriously injured in the attack, summed up the reaction to the killing of al Qaeda’s key figure in the region this way: “It may seem like a little thing to many. But the death of Fazul gives peace to my soul. Although his death may be painful to someone close to him, to me it provides a closure of sorts.”

Yet counterterrorism officials say the death of Fazul, which was seen as a major blow to al Shabaab and al Qaeda because of the young man’s talent as an operational commander, may have, in fact, raised the security threat in the region.

On Thursday, Uganda’s Inspector General of Police, Maj Gen Kale Kayihura, issued an alert saying al Shabaab may be planning attacks in the region to avenge Fazul’s death. He said these attacks could be aimed at the soft targets that have become the hallmark of the Shabaab and al Qaeda in recent years.

Security chiefs in Kenya are equally wary. Co-operation between Kenyan and Ugandan security forces has been stepped up following claims that al Shabaab might be planning attacks in the region.

Yet East Africans may draw cold comfort from the fact that security forces in the region were unable to capture or kill Fazul for the more than 13 years during which he operated in the region, despite a mountain of evidence that he spent much of that time shifting between hideouts in Kenya and Somalia.

Weeks of investigations by the Sunday Nation drew a portrait of a terror mastermind so confident in his own abilities that he evaded Kenyan authorities nearly half a dozen times in the last 10 years and re-entered the country after each of the major attacks his network carried out in Nairobi and Mombasa.

A pattern also emerged to indicate that Fazul had a group of Kenyan enablers, especially in the coastal towns of Malindi, Lamu and Mombasa, who provided him with a support network that allowed him to ship in weapons, receive treatment for a long-standing kidney problem and travel between Kenya and Somalia largely untroubled.

Coming on the back of a United Nations report on the activities of al Shabaab and al Qaeda in the region, those revelations will raise fresh questions about the security of the country in the face of the threat posed by domestic and foreign extremists.

In the early 1990s

According to a 3,000-word report on the 1998 embassy bombings made public by US authorities, Fazul first arrived in Kenya in the early 1990s.

He came in the company of a Lebanese Christian who had converted to Islam and become a naturalised American citizen named Wadih El-Hage. He is now serving life in prison in America for his role in the embassy bombings.

Fazul and El-Hage set up an NGO called Help Africa People where they employed another associate, Muhammed Sadiq Odeh. All three were linked by the fact that they were early students at the terror camps established by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The group used the cover of the organisation to bring into the country the suicide bombers who would eventually attack the embassy on August 7.

Fazul rented the house in Runda where he asked the landlord to allow him to raise the level of the walled fence. This way he could safely assemble the bomb within the building.

Most would have expected him to leave the country for good after masterminding the worst terrorist attack in East Africa.

But in the wake of the bombing, possibly enticed by the various factors that make Kenya an attractive base for extremists––corruptible immigration and police officers, easy access to smuggled weapons from Somalia and a large number of Western targets––Fazul returned to the country through Lamu in 2001.

He was introduced to villagers on Siyu Island by a local man, Sheikh Aboud Rogo, who claimed Fazul was an Islamic preacher who hoped to settle there. From that remote island, the young man from the Comoros Islands planned the attack on the Paradise Hotel on November 28, 2002, which killed 16 people.

A separate attempt to bring down a chartered Arkia airliner packed with 253 Israeli tourists using a shoulder-fired missile failed.

One of the sisters of Amina Kubwa, whom Fazul briefly married to complete his integration into Siyu Island society, recalled a young man who was retiring yet generous to a fault.

“He was just a normal guy,” said the woman, who requested not to have her name published to protect her privacy, citing the trauma her own subsequent arrest caused her.

“He was not really a preacher but would get the children to rehearse the Koran. I met him when I came home from college and found that he had told my sister Amina, who was in Class 6, not to go to school because he wanted to marry her. I asked about him and was told he was all right. I did not know he would cause us so much trouble.”

Fazul’s sister-in-law was arrested following the 2002 Paradise Hotel attacks after she was found in possession of the Siemens mobile phone the terror mastermind had used to make calls to contacts in Afghanistan and Pakistan before the attacks.

Yet if the police had done their work properly, Fazul would have been jailed well before the attacks in Kikambala. In July 2002, Fazul, who was said to be a master forger, was arrested at a jewellery shop in Mombasa after he was found in possession of a credit card that had been stolen in Europe.

It should have been a coup for the Kenyan police. Al Qaeda’s Horn of Africa chief had an international arrest warrant on his head for his role in the 1998 embassy attacks.

As it happened, Fazul disappeared from custody the next day with the police claiming that he successfully run away as they were taking him to the scene where he had been arrested to collect evidence. Most counterterrorism officials believe he bribed his way out of detention, a claim captured in Robert I. Rotberg’s book, Battling terrorism in the Horn of Africa.

A year later, police again captured Fazul after positively identifying him in the company of a Kenyan, Faisal Ali Nasur, in downtown Mombasa. This time Fazul escaped due to the commitment of his lieutenants.

As the police inspector leading the operation struggled with the terror mastermind, Ali Nasur detonated a hand grenade killing himself and another policeman. Fazul escaped in the confusion.

But none of these incidents forced Fazul to abandon Kenya as the primary base of his operations in the Horn of Africa. He continued to pitch tent in the country and settled, above all, on Malindi as the place from which he could operate.

The tourist resort town between Mombasa and Lamu is one of the most peaceful places in Kenya. Most residential homes do not have a fence round them, goats roam the streets unsupervised, eating to their fill, and tourists in skimpy dresses stroll around unmolested.

Behind this idyll, for many months on end, Malindi was the base where Fazul lived and plotted his acts of terror in the region.

The Sunday Nation was shown a number of spots where the Comoros-born extremist, known not only as a master forger but an expert in the art of disguise, enjoyed passing his time, including a popular restaurant and a prominent mosque.

Most of this information was gleaned by counterterrorism officials after interviewing some key Fazul associates who were eventually taken into custody.

Some of them were interviewed following the narrowest escape by Fazul from the police in August 2008, when it had been conclusively established that the region’s number one extremist was taking refuge in a large, two-storey building in Malindi.

Series of emails

The first tip-off that Fazul was in the region emerged from telephone interceptions of calls made from the house to Pakistan and a series of emails thought to have been sent on behalf of Fazul.

In the first week of August that year, police finally traced the house from which the calls were emerging and placed it under surveillance. It was discovered, police sources say, that Ibrahim Mahfudh, son of a local businessman, Mahfudh Abubakar, had been sending the emails.

He was followed to a cyber café where he was arrested late in the afternoon. Some say if that arrest had been followed up with an immediate raid on the house, it is possible that Fazul would have been arrested, too.

As it happened, an order came in from Nairobi requiring that the police wait for the General Service Unit to arrive from Mombasa to conduct the raid.

The GSU arrived around 2 am, and the raid was staged involving about 60 officers. It proved to be too late. The wily terrorist appears to have panicked following Ibrahim’s long absence and escaped just before the raid.

The police found two passports, one obtained on February 21, and due to expire in 2018 in the name of Mirza Adan Hussein Ali “born in Mombasa” and another identifying Fazul as Ali Mohammed Abubakar, born in 1972 in Garissa and issued on December 6, 1999.

It was the last time he was sighted in Kenya. He retreated to Somalia where, ironically, he met his death at the hands of the most poorly trained security forces in the region on June 9.

It was a fitting end for one of the world’s most determined and skilful mass murderers. But the terror he represented has not completely been wiped out.